I’m currently working on a completely re-written version of jNag that runs entirely in javascript on the client side, with a small server side plugin based on livestatus providing the data. It’s much faster, and offers the possibility of native apps for all major mobile devices (iPhone, android, blackberry, palmos) based on the phonegap platform. Should be ready for release in the next few days, I’m just having some fun with localStorage at the moment…

I’ve not really had chance to work on jNag over the last couple of days, but I managed to snatch an hour at lunch yesterday to refactor some code and do some architectural changes in preperation for 0.4. The major new feature for this release will be a ‘livestatus‘ backend in addition to the current statusjson system. You’ll be able to switch between the two by a simple config change.

Other planned features include:

Multiple server support

Configuration page (for jNag)

Nagios control page (restart Nagios, reschedule checks etc)

If there’s any other features you’d like to see added, feel free to comment. And look out for jNag 0.4 in the next couple of days.

I recently became aware of Jquery Mobile, a new framework from the group behind the rather excellent jquery, that focuses on mobile development. Using the framework you can quickly and easily produce a web app that’s tailored for mobile devices and offers a consistent user experience across a range of mobile platforms.

I decided I needed a little project to get to grips with how JQuery mobile works and, since I’d spent an afternoon at work this week setting up the rather excellent Nagios (a network monitoring server) I thought I’d have a go at producing a mobile interface for it.

Nagios helpfully provides a way of getting JSON formatted data about it’s current status via a cgi script (statusjson.cgi) so it was simply a case of parsing that data and outputting it via the jquery mobile stuff.

Here’s what I came up with: jNag (apologies for the name, it’s late). It’s a bit rough and ready at the moment, but it can display alerts (warning / critical), allow you to browse through your tree of devices and drill down to view service output. If you combine it with the rather excellent NagDroid to give you notifications you have a full mobile admin suite. Not bad for a few hours work.

A project I’m working on at the moment had a requirement for reverse geocoding (ie: taking a set of latitude / longitude co-ordinates and returning a placename) of some data coming from an iPhone application.

There’s plenty of information available for doing address to long/lat encoding using google maps and the like, but not much on going the other way.

Luckily, I found the GeoNames database, a freely accessible geographical database which offers an easy to use api.

The specific bit I’m interested in is accessed by calling this url (with your lat/long co-ordinates of course!)

As you can see, I’m sat behind a proxy so I have to use curl to get the page. If you’re not, you can replace all the curl stuff with a simple file_get_contents($url) (depending on your PHP config of course).

Also of note, if you live in the US you can get the nearest address instead of the nearest placename using a different GeoName api call. There’s a list of API calls available here

Just a quick post today, I found these handy desktop gadgets (for windows 7 and probably vista too) and thought I’d share:

The top one, which monitors CPU temperatures is an add on available for CoreTemp. You need to have the coretemp program running for the gadget to work, but the program is fairly unobtrusive and just sits in the taskbar doing it’s thing.

The bottom Gadget is monitoring my GPU (graphics card) temperature. Useful if you have an overclocked box and want to keep an eye on your temperatures while gaming. This gadget works for ATI & Nvidia cards, it automagically detects which card you have so there’s no setup needed… just drop it on your desktop. The homepage for this is in German, but if you scroll down a bit you can easily spot the download link

The new HTTP Api in wordpress 2.9 is fantastic, it standardises http requests and allows you to define a proxy through which all http requests are routed. Useful if, like me, you run a wordpress server on a corporate network.

You can configure your proxy server by adding the following lines to your ‘wp-config.php’

However there’s currently one problem with the default installation of wordpress when it comes to proxy support. Akismet (the spam filtering plugin) Doesn’t work behind the proxy. No matter what you put in for your proxy settings you’ll be told ‘unable to connect’.

The reason is that Akismet uses a ‘raw’ socket connection to do its http requests, rather than the spiffy new API. So, here’s how to fix it:

you need to edit the file ‘/wp-content/plugins/akismet/akismet.php’.

search for the function ‘akismet_http_post’ and replace the entire function (you can just rename the old function) with my newly crafted one:

So, imagine you have a Joomla site containing lots of pages about…well, anything really. It’d be nice if you could have a ‘request info’ link on each page so users could send you an email with a pre-generated subject line about that page, so you can parse emails (either manually or using some kind of automatic system) coming from the site.

eg: your site has seperate pages about ‘product A’ and ‘product B’. you want a link on ‘product A’s’ page that sends you an email with the subject line ‘yoursite.com: product A enquiry’ and the same for product B.

I can’t find any way of doing this ‘properly’ in Joomla, so here’s a hack I came up with. What it does basically is take a variable from your URL and put it into the subject box. So you can setup a link to ‘http://yoursite.com/contact-us?subject=test subject’ and the contact email form will automagically have the subject line filled in with ‘test subject’.

First up, setup a contact to send the emails from (you’ve probably done this anyway if you have a ‘contact us’ page).

Now publish that contact using the ‘contact’ view under something like yoursite.com/contact-us

now here’s the hack:

open up “components/com_contact/views/contact/tmpl/default_form.php”

the line you’re looking for is this one (it’s line 50 in my copy of the file)

change that to this:

The additional line uses the JRequest class to get the value of our ‘subject’ variable. Then we simply write that into the subject field. We also set a default value ‘website enquiry’ so if the subject variable is unset we have a nice default subject line instead of a blank box. using JRequest::getWord to retrieve the variable means our input is automatically filtered to strip out any html / javascript injection attempts.

you can now set up links anywhere in your site to ‘contact-us?subject=your subject’ to automatically fill out the subject line.